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Slim and light enough to slip in your pocket, its build quality is second-to-none, with a body largely made of aluminium.

Design

Jawbone Mini Jambox

It’s colourful too, available in nine finishes with several front grille patterns to choose from. It’s this grille design that takes up the entire Mini front panel, with large, stylised volume and play/pause controls along the top edge.

Smaller power and pairing buttons, plus a 3.5mm input and microUSB port, are found along the right-hand side, leaving the other edges clean.

At just 38mm thick, there are two small drivers and a passive bass radiator squeezed into its slim frame – a standard setup in portable speakers these days.

It’s good to see the most up-to-date Bluetooth version 4.0 is on board, and pairing is easy – you hold down the pairing button to make the Mini Jambox visible and then select it on your chosen device in the usual way.

There’s no near-field communication (NFC) to speed up this procedure, though.

Performance

Jawbone Mini Jambox

We play Iggy Azalea’s Fancy and the synthesised bassline intro lacks depth and and impact.

There’s not a lot of bass punch here to speak of, though it stays free of obvious distortion at most volumes.

The Jambox has a mid/treble-heavy character, which is no good thing: it’s a hard, thin sound, making the speaker an uncomfortable and tiring listen for any duration.

Vocals have a harshness, sounding muffled and closed in, amid a congested presentation.

This affects the timing of tracks too, which feel dynamically flat and unexciting. There’s not much volume to play with either – fair enough, considering the Jambox’s size – and it doesn’t give any sense of oomph.